What Events Should I run to Attract CTOs?

Engineering executives could probably eat steak for free 3 nights a week if they wanted to. When planning a field marketing strategy, it’s important to think about the brand-aligned differentiated value you want to deliver via your events.

When I run executive evening events, the catering is usually just sandwiches and wraps. As a solopreneur, it's really all I can afford. But they also make sense. They're filling, easy to eat while talking and they make sure that the participants are coming for the quality and relevance of the content and the networking, not for the fancy food.

There are lots of ways of getting the attention of engineering executives, and they won't all work for everyone. Here are some categories of differentiation to consider when building out your field marketing strategy.

Content

For me, the most compelling strategy for attracting well qualified engineering leaders is by offering well thought out programming that speaks specifically to the problems that your solution can help them solve.

If you've build an Internal Developer Platform, war stories from platform engineering leaders about their IDP adoption journey will attract executives wondering how to get started on a platform initiative. If you provide resilience engineering, broad content about going beyond testing to improve the reliability of your systems with case studies from other engineering leaders will probably attract just the right crowd.

I have consistently found that if you want to engage with engineering leaders who are serious about solving a problem, connecting them with content and peers struggling with the same issues is a great way to get them to engage.

Networking

It's also important to highlight who else will (and won't) be in the room. There's nothing wrong with generic engineering leadership events where team leads are sitting next to CTOs running thousand person orgs, but in general, the more experienced you become, the more you value the ability to network with your closest peers.

Sometimes if you have permission, mentioning a list of pre-registered guests in a personalized email is a great way to show how good the networking will be. When that's not an option, just being very clear about acceptance criteria (e.g. CTOs of venture backed series B → D scaleups) will act as a good proxy to let your potential attendees know they're going to be in good company.

Food / drink

There's no question that an invitation to a Michellin starred restaurant is likely to get a second glance. If you've got the budget and a sufficiently well qualified set of potential clients, a great restaurant or venue can absolutelty be a way to get in front of people who usually won't sign up for a simple steak dinner (or sandwiches and wraps!).

Just bear in mind that you've got to be extremely thoughtful in pre-qualifying invitees. If you don't know they have the problem you're solving, they may just be coming for the free fine food.

Experiences

This is the real opportunity to differentiate, and it should reflect the brand and the personality of your company.

I have one friend who wants to do a poker night for CTOs. That’s not my idea of fun, but for him and a certain subset of the CTO population, great whisky, cigars and poker would be a perfect environment to build a relationship with both their peers and their host.

The classic sales techniques of buying tickets to a sporting event or a concert is a classic for a reason and a great way to build good will with the subset of engineering leaders who care about the event you're inviting them to.

It's also OK to get creative with experiences. Maybe you want to take a flyer and invite engineering leaders to make pottery or cook food, or hack away with an arduino and robotics kit. You could set up a pickleball league, go running with them, or take them climbing for a morning one weekend. The further you stray from the normal "dinner or drinks", the smaller a subset of your ICP will be interested. But the odds are the subset that does bite will deeply appreciate a differentiated experience, so if you have enough prospects it's worth experimenting to see what will fly.

And then there's the classic ski day where you get to spend some quality time on the chairlift while enjoying the slopes and a little bit of Apres Ski fun.

The one thing I'd highlight is that the further you get away from a content driven experience, the less easy it will be to understand whether your participants are interested in you or the freebie.

It's the same reason why trade show give aways for a Meta Quest or an iPad are flawed. The good news is that you will hit your demand gen quota really fast. The bad news is most of them are never going to buy from you so you're introducing a lot of poor leads into your sales funnel.

It's really hard to right size an executive value proposition. On the one hand it needs to be differentiated and attractive. On the other hand, it's important to try to win with the content and the networking.

If you can only get in front of executives by offering them the best Omokase in the city, you might be better off spending that budget on re-working your executive value proposition and thought leadership strategy instead!